Help for English Students

Aspects of Belonging

The ETA has very helpfully put together a list of aspects of belonging. The list includes:

belonging through place

belonging through kinship

belonging through shared experience

belonging through shared culture

belonging through global networks

belonging through textual engagement

To this list my students added belonging through shared purpose, as this helped them to include many of their own experiences, including their experience of the HSC English classroom, to their resources for this study.

Remember to think outside the obvious as well. Belonging is also a word for a piece of property.

Please do not think that these are the only aspects of belonging you can refer to in your responses. They are a useful starting place but you must develop your own theses about belonging based on your own experience and texts. You can use these aspects in three main ways:

Section I: a common one mark question early in the first part of Paper One is “what aspect or type of belonging is represented or portrayed in this text? The ETA list can often supply you with an answer. For example, the poem “We Are Going” by Oodgeroo Noonuccal portrays belonging through place (more specifically, the connection between Indigenous Australians and country) and the loss of that belonging due to white settlement.

Section II: I mentioned in my last post that it is important for creative responses to have a thesis. The ETA list can help you to develop one. Which type of belonging does your character long to experience? Does he/she achieve it? How does the character feel about the outcome? For example, one of my students composed a lovely story about a gap year student feeling out of place in a remote African village but coming to terms with his isolation through a kinship ceremony, which made him feel connected to the tribe. His thesis was that one type of belonging could overcome a sense of not belonging.

Section III: when approaching your core and related texts, a good first question to ask is: which aspect of belonging (or not belonging) is portrayed here? For example, Emily Dickinson’s poetry often conveys the poet’s lack of shared experience and perspective with the people around her and her kinship with nature. Peter Skrzynecki’s poetry delves into the displacement felt by immigrants as well as their connection to their homeland and to those who have shared their experiences.

Remember when exploring ideas of belonging that NOT belonging is always implied as well. In a later post I will explore various forms of and words for not belonging to assist students in making their responses more fluent and elegant.